A new report suggests that Chromebooks are eating into Windows sales, and the major PC OEMs may leave the sub-$300 Windows market as a result. This could be great news for the larger Windows market, even if it means a sales decline.

Windows 10 is a lost cause; even in a best-case scenario where Microsoft delivers the finest desktop OS to ever grace humankind, there’s no getting around the found that Windows 10 is an attempt to revivify a slowly dying beast.

HP, after years of will-they-won’t-they deliberation, has officially announced that it will be split into two separate companies: HP Inc, which will focus on PCs and printers, and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which will take over the servers, storage, and other enterprisey aspects of HP. Current CEO of HP Meg Whitman will become the CEO of HP Enterprise; HP’s head of printers and PCs, Dion Weisler, will become HP Inc’s new CEO.

IFA 2014 kicked off in Berlin this morning, and already we’re seeing an interesting trend emerge: Those cheap-and-cheerful small-screen Windows 8 tablets that Microsoft promised back in April are finally arriving. Both Toshiba and Acer have announced their offerings (priced at $120 and $150 respectively), and the usual OEM suspects (Dell, HP, etc.) should unveil their offerings over the next couple of days. These tablets will all be fairly low-spec devices with either a 7- or 8-inch screen, and most of them will be powered by an Intel Atom (Bay Trail) SoC. This means you can now get a full Windows 8.1 device for just $120 — a proposition so juicy that Microsoft hopes it can entice customers away from cheap Android tablets and into the Windows camp.

At an event yesterday, Intel revealed the rather surprising next stage of its strategy for squeezing into the mobile market: Chromebooks! Following the failure of its smartphone efforts, and a slow start in the Windows 8 and Android tablet spaces, Intel now appears to targeting netbooks of all things. The more things change, the more things stay the same, I guess. Furthermore, not only was Google on hand at the event to trumpet its new allegiance with Intel and x86, but it also took the opportunity to stick a knife in the back of Chrome OS’s support for ARM. I wouldn’t be surprised if, as part of this renewed partnership with Intel, Chrome OS slowly shifts to an x86-only OS.

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